If you like it then you shoulda put a shelf on it.

Well. Too bad. Call me a rookie, I guess. But I decided that since the most awesome desk in the world turned out so — well, so awesome — that the only way to possibly make it better would be to make more. Why feature a single piece of furniture when you could feature a WHOLE WALL?

So I made a bunch of plywood-strip shelves to match the plywood-strip desk. Ta-daa!

Okay, so I realize that a picture of shelves just lying there, not doing shelf-y things, is not very impressive. But in my head, the shelves are already hung and the room is coming together, like this:

Except it’s actually even better than that, because now, in your head, you can replace the “desk” in the photo with this:

Nope, I haven’t gotten tired of showing you that desk yet.

I will say that the shelves were infinitely easier to make than the desk. They’re solid all the way through, so I didn’t have to really build anything the way I built the desk. Just a few days at American Workshop, gluing and clamping and sanding.

And sanding.

And sanding.

And filling hundreds of little holes, because plywood is actually quite a crappy material to work with.

And sanding some more.

Thank God for the Timesaver (and the workshop’s steady supply of clamps), or this project never would have happened.

Then I just trimmed the shelves to the right sizes and made some funky cuts on the front end, to get the right look. Because if you just leave it, the front of the shelf looks like this:

And we all know it would look way cooler like this:

For the shelves, I gave up on the “infinity” look that I created on the desk. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work without a lot of effing around, and I didn’t want to put that much energy into shelves. So the sides of the shelves look like they’ve been gift-wrapped.

Neat.

My plan is to mount them with these brackets:

I think the black wedge-shape of the brackets will complement the hairpin legs on the desk. Plus, they’re heavy-duty. Which is good, because each shelf weighs approximately one ton. You might have noticed that my “plan” shows six shelves, but the most you can see in any picture is four — that’s because they’re heavy, and I didn’t feel like carrying all them upstairs from the basement just for a photo shoot. So you’ll have to take my word for it: a) there are 6 shelves, and b) all of them are heavy.

Originally, I planned on having floating shelves, but once again I decided that there was a limit to the amount of effort I wanted to put into shelves. Brackets are easy. And apparently, I’m learning to scale back my Big Ideas.

Because making your own slabs of solid wood out of scraps is “big” enough, don’t you think?

Disclosure: This post was written in partnership with American Workshop. They have generously allowed me to use their space for this project, but have not told me what to write. All projects and opinions are my own.